PREVIEW: 2021 BRUSSELS INTERNATIONAL FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL
Friday, April 2, 2021 at 11:26AM
If there is one overriding film festival mantra in the wake of COVID-19, it sounds something like, “We’d rather have a live event, but we’ll do our damned best with what we’ve been dealt.” The latest case-in-point - the online program of the 2021 Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFFF), which blasts out to Belgian genre fans from April 6.
The 39th staging of the iconic event made the call to go 100% virtual as the pandemic peaked several months ago, a time when social gatherings were being cancelled all across the globe. In a statement via the BIFFF Board, Festival Director Guy Delmote said, “An online version of the festival fundamentally goes against its DNA. What makes the BIFFF so unique is its audience and the unique atmosphere that reigns supreme during thirteen festival days.”
However, the release of the 2021 roster of films indicates that BIFFF has not compromised its renowned curation skills in any way. A whopping 48 movies and 63 shorts will beam into the homes of Festival pass holders, delivering the next best thing to a live event. “It [may] seem strange that the BIFFF contents itself with an online edition without any physical component,” says Delmote, “but that would be ignoring the countless hours that the team put in preparing [the festival], a team that lives and breathes for the festival, a team that gives everything for the enjoyment of its audience. It would be a shame to cast that aside out of principle.”
The anxiety-inducing Italian/Belgian co-production The Shift carries the official stamp of ‘Opening Night Film’. Alessandro Tonda’s white-knuckle bomb-in-an-ambulance thriller, starring Clotilde Hesme (pictured, above) as the panic-stricken paramedic and a chilling Adam Amara as her explosive-encased passenger, will have its International Premiere via BIFFF Online. Closing out the festival will be the pitch black tragi-comedy Riders of Justice, the latest from man-of-the-moment Mads Mikkelsen, who reteams for the fifth time with director Anders Thomas Jensen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas (their last, 2015’s festival hit Men & Chicken).
The five films vying for the Golden Raven award in the International Competition sector are Cody Calahan’s hilariously bloody ‘serial killer therapy group’ lark, Vicious Fun; Ivan Kavanagh’s psychological horror pic Son (pictured, top), featuring a terrific Andi Matichak as a mother fleeing her cult past; the Russian ocean-trench monster movie Superdeep, from Arseny Sukhin; an unhinged Jasmin Savoy Brown as the triggered homicidal muso in Alex Noyer’s nightmarish Sound of Violence; and, South Korean horror auteur Kwang-bin Kim’s Poltergeist-like haunted house chiller, The Closet.
Other features that carry ‘must-watch’ status from the line-up include the World Premiere of Nick Kaldunski’s surrealist after-dark odyssey Hotel Poseidon, the first film from the groundbreaking and transgressive theatre company, Abattoir Fermé; Jeffrey De Vore’s autobiographical doco De Dick Maas Methode, a peek inside the larger-than-life world of the director of cult classics The Lift (1983), Flodder (1986; pictured, right) and Amsterdamned (1988); and, two films in the mix for the Silver Méliès Best European Fantastic Film award - Stefano Lodovichi’s The Guest Room and Péter Bergendy’s Hungarian horror opus, Post Mortem.
The global short-film community is typically well-represented at the BIFFF. An impressive 33 shorts will unfurl under the Eat My Shorts Parts I-IV, amongst them Joséphine Darcy Hopkins’ pandemic metaphor, Nuage; Marco Bentancor’s existential river-monster thriller, The Water Will Regret You; David Mikalson’s overprotective gymnast coach narrative, Stuck; and two films from the distant land of Oz - Antony Webb’s desert planet survival story, Carmentis, and Andrew Jaksch’s 60s-set/Twilight Zone-like Today, a work certain to spark controversy given its forthright depiction of domestic violence within a genre setting.
Elsewhere in the program, home-viewing audiences can binge on such fantastical short visions as French director Alice Barsby’s tidal terror thriller, Aquaticans (pictured, right); the marriage-in-a-time-of-the-undead drama, The Last Marriage, from Swedish co-directors Gustav Egerstedt and Johan Tappert; and, homegrown talent Jessica Raes stop-motion animation fable Triskelion, a Celtic clan story steeped in female empowerment.
Also running online, from April 7-10, will be the 5th Brussels Genre Film Market (BIM), featuring a schedule of theatrical screenings, industry meetings and networking events. An initiative of event organisers Peymey Diffusion in conjunction with the support of the City of Brussels and the Brussels Capital Region, the BIM market aims are to stimulate encounters between producers and buyers, facilitate financing through presentations of national and international support mechanisms and promote Belgian professionals, studio’s and post-production firms.
The 40th BRUSSELS INTERNATIONAL FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL is a geo-blocked virtual event, available only to residents of Belgium. International press can apply for accreditation at kahina@biff.net. The 5th BRUSSELS GENRE FILM MARKET is open to all industry professionals; accreditation applications can be submitted here.
